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Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Pulitzer-prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman had neither a PhD nor an academic title. ”It’s what saved me,” she said. ”If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.”

Tuchman’s illustrious career reminds us that history, although a discipline, does not require professional accreditation to explore. Beyond writing, research and organizational competence, one requires only a passion for knowledge about human nature and a sharp eye for the patterns to which it has given rise throughout the ages.

Thomas Carlyle considered history writing the first example of man’s creative thought: “There is no tribe so rude that it has not attempted history.” The ancient Greeks thought so highly of history that they accorded it its own muse — Clio, one of Memory’s seven daughters.

Sociology cannot boast so old or distinguished a lineage. Although philosophers have studied man in society for thousands of years, it was only in the 19th century that it emerged as a “science” (in quotation marks because almost from the beginning, it shed the objectivity and disinterestedness that is supposed to govern scientific inquiry).

From the 1960s forward, when the New Left started calling themselves “progressives,” sociology was subsumed into the Marxist agenda as an activist tool for social engineering. As one textbook defines sociology’s mission today, it is “to alleviate human suffering and make society a better place to live.”

TORONTO - Hundreds of members of Toronto’s gay community packed the Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park Tuesday to discuss where Pride Toronto goes from here following months of controversy.The dialogue was supposed to be "respectful" -- or at least that was how Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam put it to the crowd -- about what to do following the controversial move by Black Lives Matter, Pride's honoured group, to disrupt the July 3 parade with a sit-in that led to the recent resignation of executive director Mathieu Chantelois over allegations he'd subjected staff to racist and sexist comments and sexual harassment.But in a move reminiscent of their Pride Parade tactics, BLM members and their supporters quickly hijacked the Town Hall, using the platform to rail against police and shout down any viewpoints other than their own.Speaker after speaker argued BLM was right to want the police out of the parade and anyone who dared to disagree was shouted down, jeered and called racist...

By: Patrick Brown, Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario

Ugh, Mondays right?

You wake up, pour yourself a nice cup of coffee, and sit down to write a tidy little missive promising to scrap your province’s sex-ed curriculum. Then, you sit back and wait for your constituents to rain kudos upon you like the very golden showers their children have no business learning about. But instead, they bend you over like a Dominatrix and give you one of those so-called “peggings” they want their kids being taught at school.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

A (we’re guessing) drunk turbo-feminist entered a Lyft car, and instead of quietly enjoying the ride, she decided it was best to berate the driver for five minutes over a hula girl bobblehead sitting on his dashboard.

“You thought that was adorable,” she said to him. “You didn’t think of the pillaging of, like, the continent of Hawaii.”

For the crime of insulting the “continent” of Hawaii, the Lyft driver had to endure some of the worst entitled valley girl speak that California has to offer. Finally he decided to kick her out of the car after miraculously keeping his cool through her profanity-laden rant.

Scientists have found evidence to support what many dog owners have long believed: man’s best friend really does understand some of what we’re saying.

Researchers in Hungary scanned the brains of dogs as they were listening to their trainer speaking to determine which parts of the brain they were using.

They found that dogs processed words with the left hemisphere, while intonation was processed with the right hemisphere – just like humans.

What’s more, the dogs only registered that they were being praised if the words and intonation were positive; meaningless words spoken in an encouraging voice, or meaningful words in a neutral tone, didn’t have the same effect.

Gene Wilder, who regularly stole the show in such comedic gems as “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and “Stir Crazy,” died Monday at his home in Stamford, Conn. His nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said he died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 83...More at Variety

Lightning during a recent thunderstorm in Norway killed a herd of 323 reindeer — 70 of them calves — making it one of the deadliest strikes ever. Hunters in a remote area discovered the bodies last Friday, according to the Norwegian News Agency.

We usually hear about lightning striking people, but it does kill animals, too. Two scientists at an Australian research institute have found that everything from seal pups to wild turkeys to elephants and giraffes can be killed by lightning.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Canada's Public Safety Minister, Ralph Goodale, is a long-serving journeyman politician. He does what he's told reasonably well. The new report from his Ministry on the terrorist threat to Canada replicates the Trudeau government's ideological beliefs about terrorism and multiculturalism. Therefore it contains no surprises nor any particularly useful insights.

Though the report appears a useless exercise, it's worse than useless. It seeks to mask and deny the motivation behind the domestic terror threat. By refusing to identify the problem, it makes it that much harder to effectively deal with it. Moreover, this denial is so facile that it prevents any sort of proper understanding of the rationale that leads some Canadian Muslims to embrace Islamic terror groups.

The report states "the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), use violent extremist propaganda to encourage individuals to support their cause. This group is neither Islamic nor a state, and so will be referred to as Daesh (its Arabic acronym) in this Report."

That statement reveals a profound misunderstanding of the nature of religious zealotry in general and of Islamic terrorism in particular.

ISIS or ISIL does on occasion use what the report calls "violent extremist propaganda," showing beheadings and other forms of brutal violence. But the suggestion that they are recruiting adherents who are attracted by the thought, "gee, this can be my big chance to chop off someone's head" is as preposterous as stating that the Islamic state is not Islamic.

While ISIS' version of Islam thankfully is not the version embraced by most Muslims, it is an act of sheer ignorance to deny that it is based to a great extent on certain theological interpretations of Islamic texts and scholarship. ISIS' leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is an Imam with a PhD in Islamic Theology. It would therefore follow to reason that he is in a better position to say what is or isn't "Islamic" than Ralph Goodale.

And it is Islam, rather than "violent extremism," that draws ISIS' adherents. Recruits to ISIS join as their way of showing complete, unrestrained faith and devotion. They are fulfilling the pillar of the religion that requires participation in Jihad. Those joining ISIS are willing to become martyrs and sacrifice as service to Allah in order to get the divine rewards of paradise as promised in exchange in the Koran (Surah 2: 193, Surah 61:10-14, etc.) and Hadiths.

While explicit support for ISIS in Canada's mosques is extremely rare, the promotion of violence and Islamic dominance over others is widespread. Yet there is absolutely no mention of Islam as a motive for domestic terrorism in Canada in the Public Safety Ministry's report.

Islamic terrorism and support for it in Canada is not limited to ISIS or al Qaida, the two terrorists groups which were the focus of the report. There is also significant support for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas within some Canadian Muslim communities. Though Hezbollah in mentioned briefly as a terror group in the report, it omits noting that there are mosques and Islamic centers, such as the Islamic Society of York Region, where praise of Hezbollah and explicit support for terrorism is commonplace.

In this type of environment, the normalization of support for terrorism within Canadian Muslim communities is being facilitated rather than combated.

The government does not want to tarnish all Muslims as terrorists. That may be a laudable instinct and certainly reflects the truth that most Canadian Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding. But it is also a shameful denial of the nature of Islamic theology as it is practiced in mosques and the dangerous amount of approval for terrorism as an acceptable methodology within Islam. That is reflect to some extent by poll results showing that about half of America's Muslims feel that their religious leaders have not done enough to speak out against religious extremism. And that does not take into account people like the Islamic Society of York Region's Zafar Bangash who, through the al Quds Day rallies, actually encourage Islamic extremism.

There are a number of prominent Canadian Muslim reformers who have attempted to draw the government's attention to the growing problem of extremism in Canada's Islamic establishment. But in order to maintain the multicultural narrative that 'all is well and all cultures are equal,' those voices are rejected in favor of the established Islamic leadership that turns a blind eye to extremism and tries to paint any serious effort to recognize the problem as "Islamophobia."

In so doing, our government, through politically motivated reports like the one produced by Goodale's ministry, undermine the efforts of Canadian Muslim reformers, such as Professor Salim Mansur, Raheel Raza, and Tarek Fatah, who seek to expose and address the support for violent ideologies that have infested mainstream Islamic institutions in Canada.

Its intention may be to contribute to ending Islamic extremism and support for terrorism in Canada. Yet by ignoring the connection between Islam and terror, the Ministry of Public Safety's 2016 Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada allows the entrenched Islamic establishment in Canada to deny the extent to which approbation of violence, anti-semtism and intolerance of mainstream Canadian culture is widespread in mosques and Islamic schools.

Until the government starts listening to Muslim reformers like Fatah, Raza, and Mansur about the nature and extent of the threat we face, it's unlikely the terrorist threat will be reduced.

Friday, August 26, 2016

When Bill and Hillary Clinton get caught for bad behavior, they follow a familiar pattern. First deny, then call it old news, then roll out the attack machine of media and political allies to trash whoever needs to be collateral damage to save them. The private email-Clinton Foundation saga is now in phase three, and no less than Colin Powell has been drafted as roadkill.

The Powell-made-Hillary-do-it defense emerged late last week in two parts. The New York Times reported that FBI interview notes turned over to Congress last week show that Mrs. Clinton told the G-men that Mr. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account. The Times didn’t name its source, but in these cases always ask who benefits from the leak? Answer: Mrs. Clinton.

The Times also reported in the same story that the advance copy of a new book by Joe Conason backs up the blame-it-on-Powell story. Aficionados of Clinton scandals will remember Mr. Conason as the most dedicated stenographer in the Clinton stable.Mr. Conason has written a biography of Bill Clinton, “Man of the World.” And the Times reports that the book relates a conversation early in Mrs. Clinton’s time at State at a dinner party hosted by Madeleine Albright, another former Secretary of State. Mr. Conason writes that Mr. Powell “told [Mrs. Clinton] to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer.”

Mr. Conason writes that this conversation “confirmed a decision she had made months earlier—to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.” The Times notes that Mr. Conason “interviewed both Mr. and Mrs. Clinton for the book.” Voila, the Clintons are back at their old standby, the everybody-does-it defense.

Mr. Powell’s office released a statement saying he doesn’t recall that dinner conversation. And at a weekend event on Long Island, Mr. Powell told People magazine and the New York Post that Mrs. Clinton “was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.” He added: “Her people have been trying to pin it on me.”...

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Showtime recently aired a six-episode run of “Dice,” a semi-autobiographical series that charts the comedian Andrew Dice Clay’s attempts to revive his career amid the usual array of showbiz roadblocks and wise-cracking naysayers. The show has its share of laughs, and it brings to mind Clay’s standup act, circa 1990. You know, the Diceman—the swaggering, leather-jacketed, chain-smoking, Fonzie-pompadoured comedian with the Brooklyn tough-guy guido shtick and jokes so filthy the antiseptic moniker “adult humor” could barely capture their shock value.

Or you might remember him as his critics portrayed him: racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, and every other label our culture can bestow on a heretic. He was a caveman, a hater of all things not male and not white, a harbinger of Western civilization’s decline and fall. Pundits and activists outdid one another in describing Dice’s nastiness, and demonstrations followed him wherever he performed. When he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” cast member Nora Dunn and musical guest Sinéad O’Connor refused to attend.

Never mind that the Diceman was acharacter, and never mind that plenty of comedians in those days assumed an outsized onstage persona, e.g., Bobcat Goldthwait, Gilbert Gottfried, and Emo Philips. What mattered to critics was that Dice was saying things that were beyond the pale. They didn’t much care if they were hearing the character or the man himself. (Besides, it was hard to tell them apart.) His fans didn’t seem to care, either. Whatever else you can say about Dice, he was wildly popular at the turn of the 1990s. He was the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden, and he did it two nights straight.

Was Dice funny? Meh. He went for the lowest-hanging fruit with lots of faux bravado, dirty nursery rhymes, and simple punch lines, and most of his stuff doesn’t hold up today. (Apologies if you think his “hickory-dickory-dock” rhyme was pure genius.) It’s not so much that he was too “offensive” to be funny, it’s that the jokes were almost ancillary to the full effect of the exaggerated character. The Diceman was pure, unadulterated ego; you were supposed to laugh or cringe at his stuff, not analyze it.

What, then, was Dice’s appeal? In short, it was truth. Not “truth” in any kind of noble or literal sense, mind you, but the truth that dwells in the bowels of undistilled honesty. Simply put, Dice’s fans reveled in the novelty of hearing somebody say forbidden things. Just when the term “politically correct” was becoming part of the popular vernacular—and a rallying cry for an inevitable backlash—Dice’s uninhibited male ego carried the standard for that very backlash...

Congratulations, new college freshmen! Welcome to what will undoubtedly be some of the most exciting years of your life. Get ready to meet new people, learn things that fascinate you, and figure out who you are and who you want to be.

If you’re Jewish, you should probably also prepare yourself for the various forms of anti-Israel sentiment, and maybe even anti-Semitism, you’re likely to encounter on your new college campus.

In the past year alone, as a Jewish student at McGill University in Montreal, I’ve been called a “Zionist b—-.” I’ve been told several times that Jews haven’t suffered (never mind the Spanish Inquisition, Eastern European pogroms and centuries of violence and marginalization leading up to the Holocaust). I’ve seen my friends mocked for their Judaism in crude, hateful language on popular anonymous social media platforms. When I asked if a student publication would write about instances of anti-Semitism on campus in its end-of-year issue, I was told that those instances were already covered in “mainstream Zionist media.”

By no means do I defend every action of the Israeli government, but Israel as a Jewish homeland plays an integral role in my identity. I love Israel and firmly believe in its right to exist, just as I believe in a Palestinian state. I also consider myself a liberal and care deeply about a range of injustices, including gender inequality, homophobia and the racial opportunity gap.

Yet so many of my liberal peers, with whom I share so much common ground, have actively excluded Jewish students from their social-justice organizations. The activist community’s demonization of Israel is apparent again and again in my interactions on campus. These clubs propagate the idea that Zionism underpins many of the world’s problems, as well as claim that Jews have no right to feel connected to Israel and that any Jew who does feel a connection to his or her religious homeland is part of the problem. Despite many of our shared values, my Jewish peers’ and my attempts to reach out to these groups have often been dismissed...

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

The preposterous ideology that gave rise to campus "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" was bringing academic Liberal Arts into a state of ridicule and profound disrepute. It was a matter of time before there was either push back or the end of any value to a liberal art education.

The University of Chicago has finally decided it was time to push back:

He called for all borders across Europe to be opened, despite the chaos caused over the last year from the flood in refugees fleeing Syria and the wave of terror attacks hitting various continent's cities.

In a new publication to mark International Youth Day earlier this month, the Canadian Labour Congress painted a grim picture for workers today, and in particular, young workers. The economy is on a fast track to being a polluted unequal capitalist dystopia, according to Big Labour’s biggest alliance. Yet, salvation is possible — but only by strengthening the labour movement.

The congress says what Canada desperately needs is more and stronger unions to champion workers’ rights and protect young workers from what “a massive consolidation of corporate power.” While decrying excessive corporate power makes sense, it is a bizarre position for the Canadian Labour Congress to take. In reality, there is no greater enabler of unfair corporate power than the labour movement itself.

Think of it this way: If Burger King hired goons to forcibly bully McDonald’s franchisees into not opening new locations and competing for Burger King’s customers, we would rightly decry Burger King’s unfair corporate power. But the Canadian Labour Congress supports the same principle, by opposing free trade and calling for the government to protect Canadian corporations in certain industries by forcibly blocking competitors. What screams “a massive consolidation of corporate power” louder than the use (or rather, the abuse) of the coercive power of the state to protect corporations from competition?

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The arrests of the head of a U.S. charity operating in the Gaza Strip—and of an UN engineer—put the international spotlight on terrorism finance in the nonprofit world.

The allegations leveled against Christian charity World Vision prompted Australia and Germany to suspend their donations to the NGO earlier this month.

Mohammad El Halabi is the executive director of World Vision in Gaza. He was arrested at the Erez Crossing between Israel and the northern Gaza Strip in June and then charged in August by the Shin Bet—the equivalent of the FBI—with funneling tens of millions in donor aid to Hamas. Both the EU and the United States classify Hamas as a terrorist organization. Some of the funds diverted to Hamas were earmarked to help disabled Palestinians.

The Shin Bet alleges that El Halabi joined Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, in 2004, before joining World Vision in 2005. According to the indictment, El Halabi was instructed to join a foreign nongovernmental organization and rise high enough to begin siphoning foreign aid to Hamas projects. In 2010, El Halabi was named executive director of World Vision in Gaza...

Colin L. Powell wasn't too happy that Hillary Clinton laid her decision to use a private email address at his feet during her interview with the FBI. And he made that annoyance plain over the weekend in the Hamptons.

As I explained last week — even before Powell's latest comments — his email use and Clinton's are simply not analogous. In addition to how the rules governing electronic communication were significantly tightened between when Powell left office and when Clinton arrived, Powell neither exclusively used his personal email account nor did he establish his own private email server. Clinton did both.

Monday, August 22, 2016

“When I imagine him in the White House, I’m disgusted,” declared a Hillary Clinton campaign email that went out May 4, just after Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nominee. The putative author, deputy communications director Christina Reynolds, explained her reaction wasn’t just to Trump’s policy ideas, yucky as they are, “but also because I try and imagine him doing the more symbolic, but often just as powerful, parts of the president’s job.”

She tried, and she failed: “I just can’t imagine him mourning with the country after a mass shooting, or comforting us after a natural disaster.”

We wrote about this the next day (last item), and we observed: “Isn’t this about the easiestthing to imagine Trump doing well? Whatever his shortcomings—real, exaggerated and imagined—we’ve never heard a lack of emotional openness and honesty mentioned among them.”

If only the Green Party of Canada could have held it together for a little while longer. We may be on the cusp of an electoral reform that gives Canada transferable ballots or some form of more proportional representation. It’s the moment the GPC has been spinning its wheels in anticipation of. An electoral reform can hardly fail to help a Green party. Indeed, at times the moral case for getting rid of first-past-the-post seems to depend quite heavily on the implied existence of people who would like to vote Green, but who are discouraged from doing so by the onerous inconvenience that elections are for choosing governments.

Now the actual Greens, the people who are firmly committed to the Green party and who work for it between elections, have steered the movement into the bottomless mire that is Israel vs. Palestine. At their national convention, held Aug. 5-7 in Ottawa, Green delegates voted to approve the adoption of the “BDS” approach to Israel — boycott, divestment and sanctions — as official party doctrine.

BDS received 58.5 per cent support from Green membership in a pre-convention ballot, just short of the 60 per cent needed for automatic adoption. This vote got the BDS resolution sent to a workshop at the actual convention, and when it came back to the floor it was carried — too precipitously, it turns out, to suit the taste of Green Leader Elizabeth May.

May seems surprisingly aware that she is a crank at the head of a party of cranks that is now crossing a tolerable upper bound of crankiness. The Green party is, broadly, supposed to be a party of hippie principles. (Sorry. It’s the best possible summary.) In the view of an apparent majority of members, those principles require intolerant opposition to the Israeli state. The GPC doesn’t have a formal position on North Korea or on the Russian occupation of Karelia, and nobody, much less a majority within the party, is proposing one.

You are already adrift in a sea of political dementia if you find yourself having this argument. The position that the Palestinians are just one of many peoples that drew a bad hand in history’s poker game is an unstable equilibrium, and it is kept that way intentionally by Zionism-haters with a wide range of motives...

Sunday, August 21, 2016

If ever there was a contrast to make around "then-and-now" media coverage of a Republican and Democratic president put in similar situations and their respective reactions to it, this one definitely makes the Top 5.

2005: President George W. Bush's presidency is basically declared over after he waits two days to cut a vacation short to return to the White House to directly engage in relief strategy around hurricane-ravaged Katrina. On Day 3, he would visit the Gulf Coast to survey the damage.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are frequently proxies for Islamic anti-American and anti-Israel activism disguising itself as "Human Rights" and "Social Justice" when they often ignore grievous abuses in Islamic countries while focusing on the west and Israel.

NEW YORK // Amnesty International yesterday admitted working with a Swiss-based human rights group whose Qatari co-founder has been accused of financing Al Qaeda.

The US treasury department said it would impose sanctions on Abdul Rahman Bin Umair Al Nuaimi, a history professor in Qatar and president of Al Karama, for raising funds for Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen that at times had amounted to millions of dollars per month.

The US measures against Mr Al Nuaimi could spur debate among prominent human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch about their close association with Al Karama, which claims to monitor human-rights abuses in Arab countries.

Al Karama regularly criticises US allies in the Arab world including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The charges against Mr Al Nuaimi could also have a diplomatic impact on American ties in the region since Qatar is also a US ally.

Amnesty International acknowledged in an email yesterday that Al Karama has helped it in the past with information on cases of human rights abuse and added that it was “unable to confirm” the accuracy of the US allegations. Human Rights Watch declined to comment.

In its statement, the US treasury department labelled Mr Al Nuaimi as a “terrorist financier and facilitator”, freezing his US assets and prohibiting any US citizens from “doing business” with him. The US provided no evidence indicating how it reached its findings.

From the left-wing publication The Tyee. The author, Bill Tieleman is a former NDP strategist whose clients include unions and businesses in the resource and public sector. In his recent column, he points out some of the flaws in Proportional Representation that endanger democracy, which I'd written about over 3 years ago.

How would you like an anti-immigrant, racist, anti-abortion or fundamentalist religious political party holding the balance of power in Canada?

And that party would then get to decide who governs and what policies they adopt despite getting less than five [percent] of the total vote?

Welcome to the proportional representation electoral system, where extreme, minority and just plain bizarre views get to rule the roost.

Amazingly, Canada’s Liberal party is seriously considering implementing it here, with unfortunate support from the New Democrats and Green party.

What’s more, we can take a glimpse into that grim possible future thanks to the Green party imploding over its controversial and ill-advised decision to endorse boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel at its convention this month.

Green leader Elizabeth May – who unsuccessfully opposed the motion – could end up the first boycott victim if she divests herself of the leadership.

Or how about a worse situation where a far-right party sets a ban on Muslim immigrants as the price to put a larger party in power?

Proportional Representation is less democratic than first-past-the post. It gives political parties more power to appoint representatives than it gives the electorate the ability to chose them. It's the system that brought Hitler to power in Germany.

A new study based on interviews conducted over social media with foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria raises doubts about the commonly held notion that young men in North America and Europe who are drawn to violent Islamic extremism must be marginalized loners looking for an alternative to their dead-end lives...

Three university researchers who contacted dozens of jihadists from abroad in Iraq and Syria, including some Canadians, say they seemed to be drawn mainly by the religious ideas—“no matter how ill-informed or unorthodox”—behind jihadism. Rather than being isolated individuals who self-radicalized in front of their computer screens, the report says they usually found mentors and, at least in the case of the Canadians, joined the fighting in “clusters.”

In the working paper entitled Talking to Foreign Fighters: Socio-Economic Push versus Existential Pull Factors, the researchers caution against assuming that radical Islam appeals only young men on the edges of society, those without good job prospects or supportive family and friends.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Nadia Shoufani spoke out in support of terrorists. Not freedom fighters, but terrorists who want to murder innocents so that Palestinians can ethnically cleans Israel of Jews. That's her right, but it's not her right to teach in a publicly funded school board.

TORONTO - A gaggle of anti-Israel activists turned up at Queen’s Park Wednesday to defend the free speech rights of a Mississauga Catholic teacher suspended following her controversial comments at a recent Al-Quds Day rally.

The panel — consisting mostly of retired professors — claimed repeatedly that Nadia Shoufani is “under attack” and being silenced for exercising her right to freedom of expression about the Israeli “terrorists” who are forcing Palestinians to live “under brutal military occupation.”

“We are here to protest a campaign aimed at sanctioning and silencing her for having spoken on behalf of the rights of Palestinians who are living under brutal military occupation,” said Michael Keefer, professor emeritus of English at the University of Guelph, who admitted to never once visiting Israel or the West Bank.

(As an aside, I know people who know Salma, and she has a wicked, completely politically incorrect sense of humor) :

Yesterday we published a review of Seth Rogen’s new animated film, Sausage Party. After we received feedback about it from our Trans Editor Mey Rude, the members of the QTPOC Speakeasy and Facebook commenters, we decided to un-publish the piece. Here’s how the review came to be published on Autostraddle, why it was a problematic decision and what we’re doing to avoid mistakes like this in the future.Because the time and resources of our small full-time staff are always spread very thin, we rely on freelance pitches to cover things we can’t or won’t experience firsthand. On Saturday we received a pitch from a freelancer who enjoyed Salma Hayek’s portrayal of the animated queer taco in Sausage Party;she found it to be surprisingly nuanced. Hers was the only pitch we received about the film. None of the senior editors saw the film or wanted to...

...On Monday afternoon, I put the freelancer’s review into wordpress and was getting it ready for publication when I opened up a discussion about it in our senior editors channel in Slack. In the interest of transparency, I am copying and pasting the transcript of that conversation here:

...heather: also i wonder if the taco is bisexuali can’t believe i am having this much of a crisis about this!Yvonne: i get it though!because sausage party is crassheather: yesYvonne: like people in our community can critique the hell out of itand pick it apartheather: yesYvonne: because it’s meant for stupid fucking menheather: yes!thank you, yesthat is my feelings exactlyYvonne: and it’s not meant for usand we don’t need more media like it in this worldbecause that is the worldHeather: no!we do not!i have lost my mind, thanks a lot taco movie...

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Were you annoyed as a kid, when your parents told you to clean your room, sent you to bed early and scolded you for cursing? There might be a reason for your behaviour.

Studies suggest, that it can be linked to an increase of your IQ.

Intelligent people use more curse words

You always hear, that people who swear have a “limited vocabulary”. But if you think about it, those who don't use any swear words are the ones who limit their own vocabulary, because they intentionally use fewer words than others.

In fact, there is a study deconstructing that myth about curse words. The result showed that people who could name the most swear words within a minute also tend to score higher on an IQ test. The study concludes that a rich vocabulary of swear words is a sign of rhetorical strength rather than the attempt to hide verbal deficits.

Intelligent people are night owls

Like to stay up late? This also could be a sign for intelligence. Scientific research has linked night owls with higher IQ scoresfor quite some time now. President Obama, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Keith Richards and Elvis Presley are all famous for nocturnal activities. If you tend to go to sleep rather late, you're definitely in good company.

A messy desk and intelligence go hand in hand.

You swear a lot and stay awake late? Look, if you also tend to leave a bit of a mess behind, there's good news for you.

A study by the University of Minnesota suggests, that the messy desk of geniuses is actually linked to their intelligence. If you don't spend much time cleaning and organizing everything around you, your mind is obviously occupied with more important stuff...